2023 Unwrapped: A Journey in Reflection and Growth
Man, this year, what a ride. It basically flashed by in a second. But now it’s the end of the year and good time to collect some thoughts and try to realize what happened. Trying to sort everything, to reflect and see what was good and what we can do better.
People
The first thing that comes to my mind, thinking about this year, are the beautiful and amazing people we’ve met and worked together. From new clients, to the people we’ve been working with over the last 5 years and most importantly the people in our team. Those are the people you see all day long, most of the days in the year, you probably spent more time with them as your spouse. So for me, it’s tremendously important, to create a working environment, where everybody feels valued, is aligned with the company values and goals and has enough autonomy to work as they want. So that the people with the heart in the right place can develop as good as possible. Right now, we’re just a small team consisting of 4 people, but as the stem grows bigger, it’s good to have some nice roots.
Everybody can see that we have fun and enjoy what we’re doing, from inside the team but also from the outside. And I think that this creates desirability for us, we not only get a lot of new clients and projects in every week but also applications. Sure, we create good work too, but I’m certain, it’s how we connect and talk with people. We want that everybody feels valued and have a good time. For ’24 we definitely want to expand our team, with awesome people and the heart in the right spot. This will also be a challenge, but we already have some plans in mind to tackle this. Can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on here.
Trust the process.
This is also a kind of personal development this year. Like really, really trusting the process, to have the heartfelt deep believe that everything will work out. That you believe in the universe! Because if you do, things will take up speed, and you can achieve things, that you thought wouldn't be possible and as a side effect, you also lose your anxiety. Send the right messages in to space and deeply hold on to them, and things fall into place sooner as you think. Think about a vision board or something similar, if you really want things to happen, you and the universe will find a way. It’s incredible how this works. I used to be very risk-averse, and I think that mindset really robbed me a few opportunities. Now that I’m really trusting the process, I’m still risk-averse (in a sense that the company needs to be healthy, and we don’t gamble on one thing, you know, you get the sense…) but with way more confidence when we try out new things. Also, WE TRY OUT new things, that’s a big first for me, hire people, start new crazy projects, start new side companies, it will all fall into place.
The 1% Rule
For me, perfection is not achievable and also not desirable. If you think about nature, nothing is perfect and that makes it so beautfiul. That’s why I believe that, you can’t deliver every project 100% perfectly and I rather deliver it at 90%, because I learned that the last 15–10% on a project are the most time consumable and also the least recognized. I mean you can get to 80–90% quality of your work pretty fast and then the last 10% takes for ages. If you think about editing a photo: Cropping, Repositiong, Preset, Minor Corrections, a few small masks and a bit of retouching and you’re mostly done for 90%. But if you wanna go deeper, like pixel peeping and try to make it perfect, it takes ages, you can spend several hours on one photo. This is also not a very economic way of doing things in this fast paced time, because almost nobody will pay for so much time. Now I need to come to the point. What I mean is, that I rather finish a project in time, where I’m happy with the outcome whilst knowing there are things that can be improved and with every project, day or activity, I aim to just get 1% better. If you do this everyday, things will improve exponentially over time.
Don’t fight the progress
I remembered when I tried ChatGPT and Midjourney at the end of 2022 and I immediately thought that this new tech will be definitely a gamechanger. A year later, I still have the same mindset and we tried to implement it as good as possible in our agency workflow. We use Midjourney for storyboards and ChatGPT for ideas and text creation, now with the new Dall-E Feature we also use this for Storyboards and visualising ideas. We added a Premiere Pro Plugin for automatically Multi-Camera Podcast editing, which works like a charm. All this small tools make our lives easier and we can focus more on the things we like doing more. We will continue to browse through the endlist list of new tools emerging every week, to see whats useful and what we can integrate to create better outcome.
So this are a few things that just came to my mind about this awesome year. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved and beyond grateful to work with so many amazing humans. Let’s get pumped for 2024. If you have any questions, leave a comment or hit me up on Instagram.
